


The World as It Is

by architeuthis



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: A.R.G.U.S., Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Alternate Universe, Gen, Knightmare Verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-07
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-20 02:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8233186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis
Summary: There's something in an A.R.G.U.S. containment facility that Darkseid wants. Diana is determined to get to it first.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Prince_Milo2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prince_Milo2/gifts).



> For your Knightmareverse prompt: _Diana gets involved in an ambush like Bruce, under different circumstances and a different outcome because she escapes._

The wind throws spray across Diana's bare back and the surface of her shield. One final gesture of parting from Mera, perhaps, now that Diana has climbed far enough in the open for her hair and armor to dry—or maybe just a tall wave, filling the air with a reminder of the sea. She's grateful either way; she shuts her eyes for the moment it takes to dry on her shoulders.

Behind her eyelids lives a memory of Mera's underwater city. It's no comparison to the glory of destroyed Atlantis, and it is unlike anywhere else Diana has lived, but it is a _city_ : a city with people, with commerce, with pets and children, with darting wildlife, with gardens. A crumbling, once-abandoned place, but a living one, not the picked-over carcasses of cities that lie on the surface. She carries its sights and its muffled watery soundscape with her when she leaves, applies them to her heart like a balm.

Diana opens her eyes and looks up along the cliff face, at the yellow sky. Above her, the rock is punctuated by a great arched entrance accessible only to aircraft and the most determined climbers. Its metal doors are closed.

The sun is actinic and relentless; the wind is dry now, and it bites. She left this world a hundred years ago because its ugliness and senselessness and cruelty overwhelmed her, because she saw no hope for it. That seems naive, when she lets herself look back on it.

She plants her feet. She stretches for a new handhold. She ascends.

* * *

A stone lip runs along the base of the door, wide enough for two to walk abreast. Diana hauls herself onto it, stretches, and peers back over the edge, a thousand feet straight down to the water. She doesn't have a firm exit plan. Mera is below, watching, ready to assist if she needs it; the rest will depend on what she finds inside. She hopes, though, that she'll have an excuse to leap from here, to knife down into the water from this tremendous height, just for the sake of doing it.

She tests the little human-height access door cut into one of the full-sized doors. Locked. There's nothing to pick on this side because there's no reason to approach this door from the exterior, but that was never one of her great skills anyway. Tearing it off its hinges is more her bailiwick, but she has other options to explore first. Diana jogs to where the cliff face resumes, and takes up her ascent again.

Above the door and to either side of it, the rock is punctuated by the outlet of a ventilation shaft twenty feet across. On the schematics she stole, these three openings gave the cliff face an expression of disappointment and horror, but in person, their camouflage is good enough to disguise their shapes. Diana is a little disappointed herself. They are at least accommodating: the bolts on the grating come off easily, there is no immediate hue and cry at the squeal of metal when she bends it back, and they offer plenty of headroom once she's pulled herself inside.

The fans are off, which is convenient but raises questions. These airshafts can rapidly exchange the air in the hangar to prevent exhaust buildup, but according to those schematics, they contribute to climate control for the entire facility. Maybe the fans just aren't needed right now—or maybe this whole structure is without power. When Diana looks down into one of the hangar intakes, the only light from below is what filters through the crack in the great doors.

A ladder takes her deeper into the ventilation system. She passes two major junctions, then lets herself out into a silent HVAC room. It's pitch black until she runs her hand along her lariat and lets its glow pick out her surroundings, but when she flips a lightswitch, the overhead fluorescents come to life with a minimum of buzzing and complaint. Dust coats the floor and the controls, but not thickly.

She cuts the lights again, and is reaching for the doorhandle when she hears a raised voice, not far away, followed by a fading peal of laughter. At least two people making friendly sounds, unaware of her presence. It's not the time to smile and it's not hers to enjoy, but she does anyway.

The hallway would be as dark as the HVAC room, if not for the square of light provided by the door of—she consults her mental map—the mess hall. She'd like to take a headcount, but she settles for keeping her ears open as she creeps past the mess door, crouching to hide her silhouette. A third voice, and a fourth. Someone telling a story. She straightens once she's past, and the silent, musty dark of this place closes around her again as she proceeds.

The hangar is a cavernous, twilit space that slants up into a ramp opposite its doors. It is empty of aircraft but, to cross it, Diana must weave between the handful of land vehicles and speedboats parked at odd angles on the landing strip. If there is going to be trouble, she thinks it will be here, where she is so exposed—but she sees no one, and raises no alarm.

A stolen door code gets her into the secure containment wing, and then into its control room. A stolen password gets her into the computer where the files are kept. It is only there, after crossing an ocean and scaling a sheer cliff face and infiltrating the last A.R.G.U.S. facility, the legendary Lighthouse, that Diana comes up short.

 _GRAIL_ , she types a third time. Still no matches. _CUP_. No matches. _VESSEL_. One match, part of a salvaged Atlantean ship. She tries a few more synonyms. She tries several other languages. She tries, on a lark, _GRIAL_. No matches.

Diana spins her chair once, then stops it with her foot, gets up, and retraces her steps.

Lunch has broken up while she was investigating. She passes a barracks door and risks a glance through its window to see a man darning a sock—the first of a pile of socks—with a flashlight held in his teeth. Another flashlight bobs away from her down the hall, held by one of a pair who talk idly as they walk, like this self-imposed blackout is business as usual. Their uniforms hang too large on them, and they are armed with handguns, as though they expect to need them in a forgotten fortress at the end of the world.

Diana follows them a short way, but stops at the mess. The light through the door is dimmer now, maybe just one lamp, and after listening for a minute, she is certain there is only one person inside, whistling tunelessly and clattering dishes together. That's more like it. She pushes the door open, not especially quietly, and makes no effort to disguise her step as she enters.

The mess is too large for four people. Diana's stolen schematics indicated accommodations for two hundred personnel and a minimum operating staff of twenty-five. Through the doorway of the kitchen she can see the person she heard from outside: a short wiry woman, washing dishes under the light of a single bulb. She seems at ease, but the mess hall's hard bare walls and rows of empty trestle tables, the slumbering silence of the rest of the Lighthouse, turn the sound of her whistling desolate, like something blown in off the desert.

There's really no good way to do this. Diana settles for inserting herself into the woman's peripheral vision. "Hello," she says, when a bark of surprise and a full-body spasm tell her the woman has realized the other presence in the room isn't a familiar one, and leans in to catch a bowl before it can shatter on the floor. The woman recovers with a speed Diana admires, and draws her weapon; Diana twists it out of her soapy grip before she can bring it to bear, then sets the bowl down on the counter just in time to use her freed hand to stop the woman from activating the radio strapped to her shoulder.

"Please don't," Diana says, then stops a punch with her forearm. It's a good solid strike, and she's glad she didn't block with her bracer, which would have split this woman's knuckles. "Wait. Look. Just look at me, please." She holds the gun up by its barrel. "You and I are not enemies. So I'm going to give you back your weapon."

That short-circuits the hostilities in the way she'd hoped. The woman accepts her gun back, and doesn't lower it, but doesn't point it at Diana, either. She has curly, close-shorn hair and hollow cheeks, and, like the others, an oversized uniform. It says ARROYO on one breast, A.R.G.U.S. on the other.

"Explain yourself," she says. She has an accent Diana can't identify, which isn't unusual.

"I am Diana of Themyscira."

"I know who you fucking are. How did you get in here?"

"I climbed up from the sea realm."

"You _climbed_ the— Jesus." Arroyo reaches out and shuts off the tap, then wipes her wet hand on the thigh of her pants. She's still holding her weapon, but the last of the tension dissipates. Diana slowly removes her hand from Arroyo's shoulder radio.

"I need your help," she says.

"You scaled a quarter mile of sheer rock in a leather minidress, but you need _my_ help for something? Sure."

"There's an object in containment here that I believe Darkseid wants, and will be sending his forces to retrieve soon."

Arroyo sucks her breath in sharply and looks away; she doesn't meet Diana's eyes again until she's mastered her fear. "What is it?"

"Our sources only called it the grail, or _a_ grail," Diana says. Arroyo starts nodding before the sentence is all the way out, like this is what she expected to hear. "I don't know what it is or its significance, only that he has committed a great many resources to finding it."

"What exactly are you planning to do with it? It's not like you people have a track record of successfully protecting things from him. Like, you know. Earth."

Diana inclines her head, and Arroyo grimaces and breaks her gaze again, like she regrets her outburst.

"Darkseid's reach extends only so far," Diana says. "There are strongholds on the ocean floor of which he knows nothing. We understand what he's capable of now, and how to protect things from him."

"Sounds cushy."

"You're all welcome to join us."

Arroyo seems taken aback, but her expression quickly sours. "So that's the deal, huh? Hand over the artifact, and I'll spirit you away to—Atlantis, or whatever?"

"Atlantis was destroyed early in the war—"

"Kind of not my point—"

"—and no. You and anyone else here who chooses to join us will be welcome. I'd also like your help. These things are not conditional."

"What would happen if I shot you?" says Arroyo, holding up her gun.

Diana frowns. "I'd deflect it with my bracer."

"You're that fast?"

"I'm that fast."

"So I can't stop you."

"No," Diana says gently.

Arroyo holsters her weapon. "I'll help you find what you're looking for, because the last thing I need is some super-strong chick from space or whatever tearing this place apart. But abandoning this installation is a decision I can't make."

"Who is in command here?"

"Me, modulo one total disciplinary breakdown."

"Then you are the best person to make that decision."

"No, the best person to make that decision would be someone far enough up the chain of command to actually make it. Until I get something from them, we're staying put."

"Arroyo," Diana says. "A.R.G.U.S. is gone. Your superiors are gone."

"There's no way for you to know that," Arroyo says, with the speed of reflex. "Everything is totally crazy topside."

"I give you my word, I was present for A.R.G.U.S.' last stand. They were the unifying force of the Earth resistance after most of your governments fell. They thought they had found a solution, and they were wrong, and they fell too."

Arroyo is very still for a moment. Her jaw works minutely. "That doesn't mean anything," she says at last. "A.R.G.U.S. is designed to have no single head to cut off. I guarantee you there are surviving cells all over the place that no one knows about because they went to ground. One of them is going to surface and restore the chain of command, and when that happens, I am not going to be the woman whose only job was to keep the fires burning, and couldn't even do that."

"How long will your rations last?"

Arroyo doesn't reply, and she's not meeting Diana's eyes.

Most people outside of Themyscira don't recognize Diana's lariat as a threat until she uses it, but Arroyo reacts the moment she reaches down. With one hand, Diana cuts her off before she can draw her gun again; with the other, she throws a loop of the lariat around Arroyo's wrist.

"What the f—"

"How long will your rations last?"

"Three months at eighty percent, that's where we are right now, four if I cut us down to sixty percent. I've been thinking I could stretch it to five if I cut once and then again after about two months, but—"

"Is anyone coming for you?"

"That's—not—" Arroyo shudders, and her eyes fill up with tears. Diana aches for her, but presses on.

"Will there be any relief, Arroyo? Any reinforcements? Is anyone coming back?"

Arroyo takes a wet breath and presses her fist against her mouth. She's already answered the question to herself, so Diana doesn't push again, just waits. "No," Arroyo squeezes out, finally. "God damn it, we're going to die here and it's going to be for nothing."

Diana unloops her lariat from Arroyo's wrist, and steps back from her. In its dying glow, she watches Arroyo struggle to reconstruct her composure, the flashes of anger and disbelief and resignation. At last she reaches up to squeeze the button on her radio.

"Carson, do you copy? Over."

"This is Carson, I copy. Over." A man's voice. The one she heard telling the story over lunch, Diana thinks.

"Hey, do me a big favor. Round everyone up, and start loading provisions into one of the big trucks. Full kit for everybody and as much food as you can fit."

"Oh my god, are we doing it? Is it finally that day? Uh, over."

Arroyo shuts her eyes. "Kind of."

"Oh, is it actually the day when the rest of you leave me here to starve to death like in that dream I keep having, over?"

"Carson, just fucking do it. Arroyo out." She lowers her hand and looks at Diana levelly. "We don't have any diving gear. I assume you've got some sort of workaround for that."

"We do. Mera, my friend, will make sure you can breathe."

"I haven't heard of this Mera."

"As the sole ruler of her realm, she rarely leaves it."

"It seems so obvious when you put it that way. Come on, let's rob a military facility."

* * *

The A.R.G.U.S. database's entry describes it as _STONE BOX ORIGIN UNKNOWN_.

"Everyone just _calls_ it the grail," Arroyo says, handing Diana a printout. She shuts off the monitor and stands up from the desk chair Diana vacated earlier. "No idea why. Because figuring out what the fuck it _is_ is the holy grail? I don't even know who started it. There's no date of acquisition and no date when it was moved here, but there was a big records FUBAR in '85, so that's not that weird."

The printout includes a couple of grainy photographs of, as promised, a stone box; Diana squints at them, holds them up to the light. Even before Arroyo leads her down to the vault at the end of the corridor, the farthest and deepest part of this underground fortress, Diana has her suspicions. They are confirmed when Arroyo finishes propitiating the keypad and the biometric lock, and the doors open onto a chamber that is not a vault at all but a cave, a huge bubble blown in the rock of this island by the activity of its long-dead volcano.

Arroyo produces her flashlight, then says, "Huh," and instead hits a lightswitch, illuminating the array of bare bulbs that hang from the ceiling. "I guess there's no point in watching our power consumption if we're just going to leave."

The box sits off-center on the rough floor, a cube taller than Diana stands. It's white marble, very slightly veined with grey. At a glance it seems plain, but as she approaches, she sees the flourishes the mason's hand left: the ostentatiously precise corners, the small geometric elaborations along each edge. She reaches up to fit her fingers into them, and nostalgia breaks over her like a wave. This style of ornamentation went out of fashion on Themyscira less than a century after her creation, and she hasn't felt those particular cool shapes between her fingers in a long, long time.

She begins to walk a circuit around the cube, but stops halfway. There's a depression in one side that she recognizes immediately, but not because it's typical of this school of stonemasonry. Diana holds up her forearm for comparison—the depression is a negative of the pattern on the back of her bracer.

"Ah shit, here we go," Arroyo says beside her. "You break into a vault with a locked box in it you don't know anything about, and just _happen_ to be the one person in the world with the key? This is bad."

"Every Amazon wears bracers of this design," Diana says, running her fingers around the perimeter of the depression—the lock. The stone is as crisp-edged and unworn as though it were carved yesterday. "This isn't meant to open for _me_ , but for any one of us." She frowns. "If she could reach it, once it had been thrown down an active volcano."

"The fuck?"

"A.R.G.U.S. didn't move the grail here. It's been here for thousands of years, since before the rock cooled. They built this place around it, because they found it and couldn't move it."

As an experiment, Diana sets her shoulder against the box, mindful to avoid the lock, and pushes. The leverage is not bad, on this uneven floor; she digs her feet in until the porous stone beneath them cracks and crumples, but the box stays put. The impression is not of heaviness but of _immovability_ ; Diana thinks of a magnet, clinging to a metal table with more force than its weight should permit.

"No one," she elaborates, straightening, "can move it."

Arroyo's eyes are wide. "I'm guessing you aren't going to be satisfied with assuming it's secure and just ... leaving it."

"No," Diana says, with half a smile. "I have to know what's inside and whether it's dangerous. But _you_ may leave, if you like. Have your people open the hangar doors."

"Why? It's not like we're going to be flying out of here." Arroyo pauses. "That I know of."

"It will help acclimate their eyes to the sun," Diana says at random.

"Jesus, I just realized they're loading up with flashlights. I'm an asshole. Hang on." Arroyo reaches up and squeezes the button on her radio. "Hey, Arroyo here. Open the hangar doors. Also, electricity discipline is suspended indefinitely." A whoop comes over the airwaves, then cuts off when she closes the channel again. She looks at Diana, expectantly.

Diana raises her right arm and places the back of her bracer in the depression. Nothing happens for a few seconds. She exchanges a glance with Arroyo, whose face is studiedly neutral. It's an awkward movement, but Diana tries rocking the bracer from side to side so that the full width of its pattern touches the full width of the lock. Still nothing, but this feels right; the carving is extraordinarily precise, and every groove and curve of the design on her bracer meets it neatly. She lifts her arm away and makes a third attempt, this time starting on one side and rolling it slowly to the other.

As soon as the motion is complete, she feels the change in the stone: a liveliness it hadn't had before. It moves minutely under her touch. A split opens down the center of the surface, bisecting the lock; it must have edges sharp enough to cut, to have been imperceptible a moment ago. The air stirs as a slight pressure differential resolves itself. Diana waits a moment—she can hear Arroyo's fast breath—but nothing further happens, so she puts her hands on either side of the split and pushes.

The near quarters of the box swing away on silent, hidden hinges. The light from overhead spills along the black hair of the woman kneeling in the center of the box's floor, sparks from the chains that hold her. Her eyes are screwed shut against it, but she lifts her head and turns it left to right as though searching for a sound to tell her where she is or who she is with. When she hears Arroyo's sharp intake of breath, she jumps and, with a rattle, tries to raise her hands to shield her face. The chains are too short for that; they are too short for her to stand.

"Who's there?" she gasps.

"Holy shit," Arroyo says. The woman in the stone prison orients on her immediately, then swings her head around again when Diana speaks.

"I am Diana of Themyscira and I mean you no harm." Her voice is thicker and less steady than she wants it to be. "My companion is Arroyo of A.R.G.U.S." Arroyo makes a sound under her breath that might indicate surprise.

"I—I know that name," the woman says. "Diana. I heard of your creation, before...." She is wearing sandals and a long black chiton, and her complexion has a grey cast. From her long and sunless captivity, Diana thought at first, but it looks more like the blood under her pale skin is the wrong color. Horribly deoxygenated, perhaps. Who knows what imprisonment in a lightless stone box, in the belly of a volcano, for a period measured in geological time would do to a body.

Imprisonment by other Amazons. By a skilled and elegant Amazon stonewright. Imprisonment that could only be _ended_ by an Amazon. 

"How did you learn English?" says Diana.

The woman in the box looks up, directly into Diana's face. Her eyes are solid red. She lunges, shackled hands extended, and Diana moves a second too late; her palm strikes sparks down the length of her sword as the woman yanks it from its half-scabbard. She shatters her own chains with it just as Diana slams a knee into her face, and goes reeling against the back of the box. Diana steps up into the box before she can recover, deflects a wild slash, then allows the stab that follows to whistle past her cheek. The woman overextends, and Diana traps her arm and slams her bodily against the stone wall of the box. She paws at Diana's lariat just as Diana is trying to pry her fingers from the hilt of the sword; Diana disengages rather than trade a weapon for a weapon.

Arroyo is still where Diana left her, well back from the box, but her gun is drawn now. "Will it actually help to shoot her?" she says, half-shouting, though the room is hardly louder now than it was before. The woman casts a contemptuous glance at Arroyo as she emerges, chains rattling, from her prison.

"No," Diana says, not raising her voice. "Run. Be ready." It's clear Arroyo doesn't like this; she goes, but she hesitates at the vault door, glancing back. The woman from the box spares her no further attention.

Diana unhooks her lariat from her hip and lets it wind about her hands. "You have me at a disadvantage."

"You have no idea, Diana of Themyscira."

Diana sighs. "I meant that I'd like to know your name."

"You already know." The imprisoned woman feints at Diana, which she ignores. "My price for allowing these humans to swarm around my cell for so long was that they call me by my proper name."

" _You're_ the 'grail' Darkseid is looking for." Diana almost sighs again.

"Just Grail will do fine."

It's not a feint this time. Diana slips under Grail's sword swing and sweeps her legs from under her. She goes down with a clangor of sword and chains striking stone, but pushes off the floor and drives both feet into Diana's chest so hard that Diana is thrown, clattering, fifteen feet. She wasn't that strong a few moments ago, scrapping with Diana inside the box; nor was she so fast as to be on Diana before Diana could kip up, but that is exactly what she does now, and Diana finds herself with her own sword at her throat. Grail is more powerful and more confident by the second.

Best to resolve this soon.

"You're sorrier than I imagined," Grail says. Diana grips the blade of the sword and watches her steadily. "Princess Diana, the hope of the Amazons. It took a full battalion and the work of their best minds to imprison me, back when you and I were both young. When Father told me it was _you_ he had chosen to free me, I was eager to fight you. But this is boring."

"You're an Amazon yourself. Your father is Darkseid?"

"Did it really take you this long?"

"He spoke to you in your prison? He told you his goal?"

"Among a great many other things."

"When you envision it, a universe scoured clean of free will, do you imagine it's _less_ boring than this?"

"Oh, Diana. Diana. You perfect fool. You think I'm another of Darkseid's instruments, like his sad little Kryptonian pet? No. I am his undoing. I am his death. And he loves me so very, very much that he filled my mind with war and science, and then he engineered my freedom."

Diana lets a little of the tension go out of her shoulders, and allows the full extent of her surprise to show on her face. "Then why I are _you and I_ fighting each other?"

Grail throws her head back and laughs. "Wait until you see how I plan to do it."

The moment Grail's attention wavers, Diana swerves her head and shoulders to the side, clenches her hand around the sword and pulls with all of her strength. The point of the blade digs into the stone next to her ear; the edges leave cuts across her fingers and palm. Most importantly, the hilt slips out of Grail's grasp. Diana plants her boot on Grail's stomach and flings her away; as she tumbles, Diana vaults to her feet, and retrieves her sword with her bloodied hand.

Grail regroups almost at once and they close with each other again. Diana's sword bounces harmlessly off Grail's shoulder, then grinds along her side, inflicting nothing worse than a cut in her chiton. They circle each other; Diana thinks. Grail _can_ be contained; she _has_ been contained, even if by people whose skills did not overlap with Diana's. Even Darkseid has weaknesses. Diana has personally explored a few of them.

"Attention shoppers—" a tinny voice begins; the intercom, echoing from out in the corridor.

The first voice is immediately replaced by Arroyo. "We have incoming. North northeast, airborne, looks like Superman, ETA roughly five minutes."

Grail laughs again, her delighted, snarling laugh. Diana entangles her with the lariat, but its coils won't hold her; she tries again to steal it from Diana, but she can't hold it either and it slithers from her grasp. For the first time, Grail shows an emotion other than amusement or contempt: she bares her teeth in anger. Something crackles from her eyes, and Diana recognizes it just in time to duck away. The same red beams that Darkseid emits lance past Diana's shoulder and disintegrate a neat oval of the rock wall. The light of them is sickly red, and they do something awful to the air they pass through; there is a smell of ozone and corruption.

"Finally," Grail says. "I thought I'd have to kill you hand-to-hand. We're not animals."

Diana blocks the next blast with her left bracer. She's enveloped in red light, but she is safe, she thinks—until the bracer warps and fragments, and explodes from her arm in a dozen half-molten pieces.

She will be astonished later. She might let it devastate her, for a while. This war has taken most things from her, but few actual _things_ ; in the grand scheme her possessions are not important, but it's rare to lose one. There's no time for that now. Grail sways in place, head sagging on her neck, more depleted than she must have expected. Diana takes the opportunity to step into range and drive the point of her sword directly into Grail's right eye.

The scream is enormous. It fills the vault; it splits into vicious harmonics, an echo of Darkseid's alien voice. It makes Diana's teeth hurt. It makes her hate her own ears for hearing it. Grail clutches her face, which streams with black blood. Diana turns and runs.

"ETA three minutes," Arroyo says over the intercom as Diana pounds through the halls of the Lighthouse. They're lit now, and it makes them half-unfamiliar; she narrowly avoids a wrong turning. She doesn't hear Grail giving chase, but she isn't sure she would over the sound of her own boots on the metal floors. "Please hurry."

The hangar is filled with the thin yellow sun of Darkseid's Earth. Arroyo is not far from the door to the containment wing, just hanging up the intercom handset; the other three people Diana heard in the mess earlier, and one more who was either not there or too quiet to catch, cluster around a truck with its back gate still open. The moment she sees Diana, Arroyo pushes off the wall and falls in behind her at a run.

"Holy shit," one of Arroyo's people says as they approach. Diana recognizes the face of the man darning socks, and the voice from the radio and intercom: Carson. "That's Wonder Woman. You made me get on the PA to _Wonder Woman_."

"Get in the truck and close the doors!" Diana shouts, and the other four scramble to comply.

There's a brief bottleneck when Diana and Arroyo both go for the driver's side door of the truck, but Arroyo concedes immediately and runs for the passenger door. It's been a while since Diana has had cause to drive anything, and she had half forgotten how awkward a shield and sword are in the cab of a truck. The key is in the ignition; she fires the engine and brings the truck around.

"Uh, just take the ramp up, and when we get to the gates I'll jump out and open them," Arroyo says tensely. Both of them are looking straight ahead through the windshield, out through the hangar doors, at the sea and the sky and the approaching figure of Superman, still a minute away. He's too far out for Diana to see his fac as anything other than a flesh-colored smudge against the blue and red he wears, but she knows a little about his abilities, his senses, and she imagines he is looking her directly in the eye.

" _Who the fuck is that_?" someone says from the back of the truck. Diana glances to her left to see Grail emerging from the containment wing door, face bloodied and teeth bared. The chains from her cell still swing from her wrists. Diana steps on the gas.

"Uh," Arroyo says again. The first stirrings of agitation are audible from the back of the truck. "There's no ramp down the cliff, you have to turn us around."

Before his death, Batman gave Diana his dossier on Superman, because dossiers were the language of Batman's thoughts. At the time she had never seen Superman fight; she knew of his reputation, and she knew the seared and cratered land that indicated his displeasure, or Darkseid's displeasure expressed through him. She still has not met him in battle, but she has witnessed him in it, and seen for herself what the dossier told her: Superman is not a warrior. He is the son of a farmer, and he became a journalist. Worthy professions, both of them. But a journalist with the terrible power of a god is still a journalist.

Grail is probably going to kill him. Either way, this island will not be here much longer. Diana just hopes they'll keep each other busy long enough for her to lose them.

"What the fuck, Diana, turn us around!" Arroyo scrabbles at Diana's arm, at the steering wheel, but Diana is as immovable an object to Arroyo as Grail's prison was to her. The agitation in the back of the truck has erupted into panic: _holy shit Wonder Woman is crazy she's going to kill us_. Superman will reach them in thirty seconds, and he isn't slowing down; he may intend to demolish the island outright. In her rear view mirror, Diana sees Grail watching his approach with her remaining eye. She is smiling.

"Trust me," Diana says as she accelerates.

"That would be a lot easier if you weren't driving us off a cliff!"

"I _will_ get you to safety, Arroyo."

Arroyo stares at her for half a second, then reaches for her seatbelt. "Fuck it, everyone buckle up and hold onto something!"

Diana changes gears and puts on one last burst of speed.

The Lighthouse disgorges them into thin air. Momentum carries the truck almost straight forward a few vehicle-lengths; then gravity takes them and they drop like a stone. Diana puts her head out the window and watches Superman pull up short in the air just above them. Because she's looking up, she doesn't see the geyser begin, but she feels it when it strikes the undercarriage of the truck, a foamy torrent of seawater that devours their downward speed. Her hair is instantly soaked; Arroyo recoils from the spray that comes in through her own open window. Over the sounds of the truck itself and the water striking it, Diana hears Superman's sonic boom finally catching up with him.

This is better than free-diving it, actually.

Superman watches this for a moment with a posture that might indicate bewilderment, then darts down out of the air to capture them. Before he's covered half the distance, a tentacle of solid water, meters thick and luminous with Atlantean magic, leaps from the surface and swats him back into the sky with such force that it creates another _crack_ of supersonic acceleration. The inside of the truck is briefly thunderous with shock, which turns into startled laughter. Diana looks down; through the spray and pas the churning surface she can see the enormous octopus Mera conjures for large-scale battle and public works projects, picked out in blue light. Now that their descent has slowed, more of its tentacles emerge from the water to entwine the truck and guide it down.

The sea accepts them gently. There is a little hyperventilation in the back of the truck, but they resolve it among themselves. Arroyo is quiet, staring out her window at the animals that flicker past it. She touches the boundary between air and water tentatively, as though afraid she'll burst it, then slowly puts her whole hand through. A seahorse sculls frantically away.

"All right," she says, wiping her hand on the sleeve of her uniform. "That went okay."

"Thank you for your trust."

"Well, I wasn't drowning in other options." Arroyo is quiet for a while, still riveted on the view outside her window. Then she says, softly, "Holy shit," and begins to laugh under her breath. Diana squeezes her arm.

Some impact or explosion in the Lighthouse reaches them as a shockwave. Diana cranes her neck, but no debris or bodies hit the water, and she can divine little. The octopus bears them down, through the region where the sunlight reaches and into the blackness below, then farther, until its light is joined by the blue and yellow glows of Atlantean lanterns. Condensation forms on the windshield and Diana wipes it away. Mera's honor guard floats at attention above the white slope of the sea floor; Mera herself watches them descend with folded arms and a raised brow.

"Um," Arroyo says. "Is this the one you said was a queen? I didn't think I was going to have to _meet_ her."

"Don't worry," Diana says. "She knows you don't know Atlantean protocol. Be respectful and don't panic."

Arroyo pauses. "You bring in a lot of strays?"

"She is probably going to make fun of me," Diana admits.

The truck comes to rest gently on the furrowed sand. The octopus relinquishes it and hovers above, a vast tentacled brightness. Mera swims to meet them with that effortlessness Diana won't be able to match if she lives under the ocean for a thousand years, and stops at Diana's window in a billow of red hair and diaphanous green fabric. Diana has been topside for less than an hour, but she finds herself feasting on the sights of the undersea like a starving woman anyway: the blunted edges of the light, the soft puffs of disturbed sand where the truck's wheels touched down, the omnipresent living things.

"When you said you might need me to catch something, I imagined an artifact," Mera says, reaching into the cab to clasp Diana's hand in her cool, wet fingers, "not a truck full of—your bracer is gone."

"Things went very differently than I expected."

"So I see. Well or poorly?" The water and the membrane of magic that keeps the air inside the truck shape Mera's voice strangely; it's muffled but seems to come from everywhere.

Diana glances back at Arroyo, who is staring past her at Mera with huge eyes, and then out the window at the blue-black infinity of the ocean. "Darkseid has a daughter. A half-Amazon who has been imprisoned inside this island since the century of my creation."

Mera flinches back from the window as though Diana had reached through it and struck her, and her face hardens. "A _child_?" The edge in her voice comes through loud and clear.

"Not if she aged like an Amazon, but I don't know. It's monstrous either way." Diana watches Mera's jaw work. "And I wonder how differently this would have gone if she hadn't been in a box for thousands of years, alone but for Darkseid speaking in her mind."

"Then the intelligence that lead us here—"

"All planted. Darkseid tricked me into freeing her."

Atlanteans don't sigh, but Mera's shoulders slump.

"She intends to kill him," Diana continues, "not serve him, but is no ally to us either. She's engaging Superman right now, and I think she will defeat him. I recruited what may be the last living A.R.G.U.S. personnel—this brave woman is Arroyo, and the others in the back serve with her." There's a tiny _Hi_ from the passenger seat. "So, is that well, or is that poorly?"

"I see," Mera says again, and releases Diana's hand. That feels, for an instant, like an indictment, but a moment later Mera touches her cheek. Her sleeve drips onto Diana's already-wet leg. "Are you alive?"

Diana wants to say _What?_ , but she knows that tone; she's known it since long before she met Mera. She is receiving a lesson from a warrior-queen. Hearing Mera speak this way to the soldiers she trains makes her desperately homesick; having that tone directed at her, now, after all that happened and all she learned on the surface, is worse. All the questions she would ask Hippolyta crowd her head.

"Yes," Diana says instead.

"Did you save lives?" Mera continues.

"I did."

"Do you know more now than when you began?"

"Yes."

"With the world as it is now, we take what we can. Gather our new friends and come home."

**Author's Note:**

> I can't thank [TKodami](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami) and [Liodain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain) enough for their support and cheerleading, or [affablyevil](http://archiveofourown.org/users/affablyevil) and [zeitheist](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zeitheist) enough for alpha/beta reading. Any remaining errors are my own. 
> 
> If reblogging's your thing, you can do that [here](http://thetrollingchaos.tumblr.com/post/152081920188/the-world-as-it-is-wonder-woman-67k-words-dc).


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